


Et in Arcadia ego

by apiphile



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Gen, M/M, author opinions and character opinions are not the same thing, creepers gonna creep, fucking fanfic why are you, her name is raven not mystique you fucking pain in the ass character list, i don't know if what i was going for worked, i hate writing at all actually, i hate writing sex scenes, if it worked this should be incredibly creepy, obsessive description of background, stop assuming i agree with him just because i write him, telepaths are a menac and must be stopped
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-04
Updated: 2011-07-04
Packaged: 2017-10-21 00:23:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/218760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything’s just fine and beautiful between the world’s most lovely mutants. No, really. It is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Et in Arcadia ego

The morning glory is in flower. It coils like amorous fingers around the fallen body of a once-great tree, now so desecrated that it is impossible to tell the species, just another arboreal relic in the forgotten background woodlands of the Westchester School.

Erik is barefoot, his toes gripping the bark of another, more youthful and still vertical tree, his hands hugging each nubbin and protrusion. He has climbed half-way up the branchless body of the tree, a good three metres above the profusion of leaf-litter, and now he is within reach of the lowest of the branches. With a little more careful climbing he can be above the treeline and get a clear view of the estate –

“Erik?”

Oh, great.

“What are you doing?”

Erik looks down over his shoulder, maintaining his grip on the tree with difficulty. Raven – the face that Raven is wearing now, anyhow – peers up at him from what passes for a path out here. He could be extremely sarcastic at this point, but it won’t shut her up and make her go away and besides, she has done him no harm.

“Climbing a tree,” Erik says shortly, hoisting himself up a little further. The branch is within reach.

“I can see that,” Raven says in a voice which suggests she might have just as easily replied with “duh”, except that she’s been trying her hardest to modulate her language as well as her looks recently – the language to match Hank’s. It doesn’t take a mind-reader to see that she is afraid he thinks she’s dumb.

“Nothing wrong with your eyes, then. What do you _want_?” Erik seizes the lowest of the branches, and with barely a huff of effort he drags himself from embracing the tree-trunk like an affectionate bear to crouching on a branch with his toes curled. When he looks down, Raven is fiddling with “her” hair.

“Have you seen Hank?”

“No,” Erik says, ignoring the obvious lie in her question, “Why would he be out here?”

“I don’t know,” Raven says with evident sarcasm, “Climbing trees, maybe?”

“Something the matter?” Erik asks, impatient. He could straighten up and carry on climbing, but that would make conversation a little harder; he’s not exactly concerned for her – after all, Raven lives in a mansion the size of one of the _streets_ he grew up in, with her doting and stupendously wealthy brother, although he’s aware that’s not all the protection a woman needs; wealth didn’t protect Kaufhaus Nathan Israel – but unnecessary cruelty to the undeserving is not his way.

“I –” She rubs her forehead, her neck, and for a moment he can see the blue in her skin, the red in her hair. It is beautiful, in the way that storms far out at sea and the compact ice at the centre of a glacier are beautiful; something beyond sculpture or understanding, and endlessly sad. “I don’t.” Raven pulls at her fake-hair, her pretence-of-hair, brushing it across her lips with a frown. “I don’t re—I don’t know.”

He sits down on the branch. This is either going to be a very long and confusing conversation or a very short and troublesome one; either way, Erik suspects he’s not going to see the lie of the land today. “Were you looking for me or for Hank?”

“I don’t _know_ ,” Raven says, and she sounds a little more fearful now.

There is an answering chill in Erik’s stomach, a faint, insistent knocking of recognition, and he abandons his curiosity for the time being – there are probably maps in the library – and jumps down from the tree. He lands well, rolling the force of his drop and springing to his feet almost as smoothly as Hank might. “You don’t know.”

“I just, I was in the library and I was going to,” Raven begins, frowning into the middle-distance, “I was looking for, and then I came out here to look for …”

“You are aware that you’ve used about one noun so far,” Erik sighs, covering the queasy feeling in his stomach with irritation, but Raven is hardly listening to him anyway. There is wind in the woods, a low breeze that makes the petals of the morning glory flutter like feathers on the hats of rich ladies.

“I _think_ I was looking for Hank,” Raven says tentatively, looking at him at last, her borrowed brow still furrowed and her eyes – oh, she is worried; her eyes have reverted to their natural hue. “Or I was looking for you. But that wasn’t what I was looking for to start with.”

Erik’s stomach feels exceptionally cold.

“Am I going mad?” Raven asks plaintively, searching his face for something. Presumably whatever sort of reassurance Charles is capable of doling out like some Christian alms-giver with charity, and which Erik hasn’t the temperament for; he thinks, as the wind pulls her pretence of hair back and forth across her face, her mask, that if he were Charles he would hug her now. It would be the comforting thing to do, but there is too much on his mind and, he suspects, too much on hers. Or rather, too little – less than is normal.

“I might be the wrong person to ask about that,” Erik acknowledges, a little wryly. “Perhaps you should go back to the library, and see if you remember what you were looking for.” He knows he’s lying to her, but he’s got this nagging feeling that he’s also lying to himself; the light breeze stirs the morning glory and Raven’s false hair in turn, before hurrying on out through the wood.

“Yeah,” Raven says uncertainly, breaking his gaze. “What … why were you up that tree?”

 _Planning my escape,_ Erik thinks, glancing back up at the branches as if admiring them. His heart feels almost leaden. “Well, I’ve got to keep in shape somehow.”

“So that you can kill –” Raven begins, then shakes her head. There is a moment in which neither of them says anything, a vast emptiness between words or meaning where there is only the sigh of wind rearranging the foliage around them. The shadows of the trees fall like the stripes of a tiger over Raven’s carefully-imagined hair, over her shoulders, and probably over his face.

The morning glory is in flower.

“Did you want something?” Erik asks, watching Raven’s eyes regain the false hue she insists on wearing, slipping their natural colour away behind her endless mask.

“It’s … time for dinner,” Raven says slowly, as if she has lost something and can’t quite put her finger on it.

He can sympathise.

* * *

The Xavier mansion has so many rooms that without either a lifetime’s knowledge of the place, a map, or an exceptional memory for location and direction, it would be easy to become hopelessly lost. Erik is fortunate; though he is unable to acquire the second, and can hardly draw upon the first, he is blessed with the last not through the lucky combination of genes as expressed by Charles’s _fascinating_ thesis, but rather through good practice and endless training.

Erik walks the corridors rather like a disgruntled ghost; it is late, and the demarcation of where their tiny private army of mutants _should_ be and where they _shouldn’t_ be is clear by which parts of the house are illuminated and which in darkness. Erik gravitates toward the shadows like rocks toward the earth, his feet silent in socks on the elderly rugs on the floor.

There is a staircase if he turns left here – a narrow affair, clearly designed for use by servants. Erik treats himself to a grim smile in the dark; what’s easy access for the servile is easy access for a man’s enemies, but every man who ever built a house like this clearly thinks himself immune to invasion. He ascends the steep stairs in the dark, feeling his way through the fabric of his socks and the nails in the floorboards.

There are twenty-four stairs in this staircase. It comes out on the third floor, between Charles’s private library, where the manuscripts detailing the outlines of the estate lie, where Charles has kept, among other things, his logs of their training together. Erik slips quietly out of the door at the head of the stairs and swings round to the door to the library. It matters little if he’s locked it – aren’t all locks metal? – but he finds the handle turns easily in his grip.

Unbidden, Erik remembers the first time he snuck through a house like this, a vast architectural undertaking filled with centuries of privilege and wealth, ignoring the exquisite workmanship of paintings and tapestries in favour of more ephemeral targets. That time, he had a gun in his hand and another strapped to his outer thigh, a knife in his boot and the red-hot coal of need for knowledge burning in his mind like the guts of a volcano, unquenchable and elemental.

 _That_ time he left with what he needed to know and his right arm red to the elbow.

Erik steps back from the library door and rubs at his eyes.

He’s not wholly sure how he managed to become _this_ lost in search of the kitchens, but Xavier mansion is like some great anthill, filled with dark corridors and silent industry in the occupied rooms. It is easy to be turned around and find oneself in entirely the wrong place.

Curiously, he doesn’t feel hungry enough to continue his mission for a late supper, and in a flash of inspiration Erik proposes to himself that he’ll see if Charles is awake, and interested in continuing their game of chess.

* * *

On the shore of the small, man-made lake, Erik jogs up and down on the spot for a moment, trying to coax his circulation into greater efficiency. The water should not be too cold – it is, after all, not quite yet September – but in his experience it is better to be over-prepared than unprepared. The air is perfectly still, a late-summer blanket of heat lying on the estate like cloud, and there is the suggestion of a thunderstorm maybe two days away.

“Are you sure about this?” Charles asks him, with a concerned grimace. His hair is growing lank with the oppressive weather, but his spirit seems uncrushed, his careful interest in their safety undaunted. “You have a troubling obsession with putting yourself in harm’s way.”

“There are people out there – a lot of people – who want to harm us,” Erik says, managing to avoid _me_ at the last minute, “it is only practical to learn to cope with the situations that’s going to throw us into.”

“You’ll _drown_ ,” Charles says, appalled. “Erik, this is at best showing-off. You can’t possibly hope to learn anything from being, being _hurled into a lake_ with your hands bound. My theory – at least listen to the idea – you can’t rely on rage to see you through everything.”

Erik holds his hands out, wrists together, and grins very widely. It is not a friendly or an inviting grin, although he concedes that it may be marginally flirtatious. “On the contrary, I’ll learn how to use my powers without relying on the use of my hands to enhance their effect.”

“Crisis theory,” Charles sighs, holding up the length of wire Erik gave him for this very task. “No, this is absurd. You will _drown_.”

“Or I will learn how _not_ to drown next time I have to stop Schmidt from escaping in a submarine which was, lest we forget, _your fault_.” Erik makes an emphatic motion with his wrists, shoving them towards Charles again. “And that is why I have to jump in a lake.”

“You were _drowning_ ,” Charles insists, as he begins to bind Erik’s wrists with a put-upon sigh.

“I had Schmidt,” Erik says, watching Charles bend the stiff metal with difficulty and a certain delicacy around his forearms. The trepidation on his face suggests that he is trying to ensure he won’t break Erik’s skin or cause undue constrictions to his blood flow – a courtesy which Erik is sure Schmidt – Shaw – and his friends would hardly afford him. “What happens after that is of no consequence.”

“Your priorities are somewhat distorted, my friend,” Charles says, busying himself with the wire as if it is infinitely more difficult than Erik knows it to be. “You would have died.”

“Purpose,” Erik says, as Charles looks up from the wire, no doubt preparing himself for further entreaties to Erik’s sense of self-preservation.

“I beg your pardon?”

“My purpose, not my priorities,” Erik corrects. Charles leaves the wire partially undone and stares at him in apparent and possibly-faked incomprehension. Erik sighs. “You presumably also have a greater purpose.”

“I,” Charles frowns at him. “Well, yes, of course – the protection and integration of others like us and the harmonious progression through this next step of evolution, but I –”

“And I will happily join you in that,” says Erik, coolly excising the word ‘integration’ as an impossibility and making a mental note to shoot down any further suggestions of finding the unfindable or rebuilding Cerebro, “in any capacity you require and to any end you suggest. _After_ I have made sure that Schmidt – Shaw – is dead.”

“And if the time comes where you must let him go or destroy yourself?” Charles asks. His hands remain on Erik’s wrists, though Erik notes he’s not twisting the wire about them any longer, and he holds Erik’s gaze with as much tenacity as anyone ever has.

Erik says, “He killed my mother.”

It is a certainty which drives his every waking move: he does not mention the torture, barely lets himself recall it. There is too much danger of self-pity, and there is something distasteful, something unclean in saying _the things he did to **me**_ ; there were moments, dark and agonising hours, when he was sure that he had somehow deserved the pain, earned his weeks of mutilation and torment through some defect in his being, some rottenness at the centre of his soul of which he had been previously unaware. But his _mother_ , his mother. She had done nothing. She had harmed no one, made no missteps against the land, the people, or even the God that Erik still finds himself cursing in the moments when he doesn’t flatly refuse to believe in him at all.

Schmidt killed his mother, and that means nothing else he has done can be right.

Charles sighs and removes his hand from Erik’s wrist, to lay it on his shoulder and squeeze just firmly enough to be companionable rather than painful, “I wish, you have no idea how much I wish I could dissuade you from this.”

Erik forces a laugh. “It’s just an impeded dive, that’s all.”

The lake is as still as a mirror, reflecting the tips of trees and the overwhelming presence of the radar dish, as huge as a mountain and as apparently implacable. There are wheeling, swirling flocks of birds at the skyline, chasing each other in unfathomable patterns through the glutinous August air. Erik almost inhales a gnat, and blows it away from the corner of his mouth instead.

“Are you _sure_ about this?” Charles taps the wire around Erik’s wrists with the tips of his fingers.

“What?”

“… _Jumping in a lake_ ,” Charles says, sounding almost amused, “with your hands tied.”

“What? No.” Erik snorts, wriggling his fingers until he can feel the wire loosen and begin to unwrap. What an idiotic idea; he unties the wire, and slowly, tidily coils it into a spiral. He drops the little coil into the palm of Charles’s waiting hand with a bemused expression, unsure of what on earth he’d been thinking.

* * *

There is barbed wire at the perimeter. Erik is unsurprised; Xavier Senior’s preoccupation with the arrival of some forgotten war on the shores of America seems to have been an all-pervading obsession, with the resources to underpin his paranoia. And of all the obstacles in the world that might keep Erik penned in the Westchester estate, this is one of the least.

Erik extends his hand and rolls back the wire like Moses on the shore of Yam Suph.

He is equipped, as he steps through the gap: a knife strapped to his shins, maps and money liberated with a conciliatory note in their place from Charles’s study - _If I survive, I will pay you back. E. L._

There are hollies, possibly imported, on the slope at the other side of the wire, and their waxy dark leaves prick and tug at his skin, at his clothing, as he descends with as measured footsteps as he can manage on an incline this steep; it would be easier to run, leap, and clatter on through the undergrowth, but it would also lead to him breaking an arm on some concealed fallen branch. He dislikes the exercise of caution over alacrity, especially with so many months lost, but he’ll lose even more time if he cripples himself in his escape.

He has timed his exit carefully. Charles, Raven, the assortment of developing soldiers, and that Moira woman, they will not miss him until this evening. He has four hours to get away and pick up the long-cold trail of his quarry once more. The distances he has to cover in order to do so may well include half of the globe, but Erik cannot abide another minute of _doing nothing_ , waiting for Schmidt, for Shaw to come to _him_.

Erik slithers the last few metres down the bank, leaps over the gully at the foot of it, and picks up his pace to jog through the undergrowth, fast enough to cover more ground but not so quickly that an unforeseen obstacle is likely to dislocate a limb. The road is maybe five kilometres away, maybe less – a brisk walk would have him there quickly enough, and while Erik is sure hitch-hiking will be entirely unsuccessful, he’s confident in his ability to hijack any passing vehicle, including motorcycles. It’s not as if he hasn’t done it before.

All he has to do is keep going at a ninety-degree angle to the sun, and he should hit the road.

Schmidt may have escaped his grasp, but Erik is sure he won’t elude him again; he is sure because he is sure of himself, that he will keep walking, running, driving, and riding after the memory of that sick smile and the things it has ordered, and he will keep doing it until one of them is dead. He cannot fathom how he’s come to remain so long in the lap of luxury, twiddling his thumbs and twisting metal to no end; has he really become so indolent, so dissolute, so divorced from his goal?

Erik puts his best foot forward and his head up and ignores the stinging slaps of creepers and thorns.

There are flying insects everywhere, making the most of the late-year sunlight and also, apparently, of the salt in Erik’s sweat. He lets them gorge themselves silly as long as they stay clear of his eyes and mouth, unconcerned; early fallen leaves crunch and disintegrate underfoot, the leaf-litter below them squelching downward rather than slipping sideways, and he keeps his balance perfectly.

His muscles glow with warmth rather than burning, and he feels alive, free, _powerful_ , his hearth thumping like the massive automated hammer in some great Soviet factory.

The sun is directly ahead of him. If he keeps up this pace he will be back at the mansion in time to wash before dinner, instead of showing up sweaty and fly-bitten; there is an uncomfortable protrusion against his shin, but at present there’s not point in stopping to examine it. All he can tell, as he lunges through the overgrown copse at the back of the estate, is that it is metal, and that it probably shouldn’t be there.

* * *

The sun is low, autumn light flooding the west wing bedroom as if someone has upended a bucket of molten gold through the window. It highlights everything inside the room that is remotely reflective; it glints from the radar dish outside, from the lake, drawing long black shadows over the lawns like the scars on Erik’s skin, inverted.

Erik closes T. H. White and stares blankly at the cover. The gold embossed title is almost worn off, leaving only furrows in the fabric and the card below, and the corners of the pages are dog-eared almost throughout the book. It is a well-read and possibly well-loved copy of a simplistic but compelling drama of power and sacrifice.

There is a breeze out there, even a wind – it attacks the treetops, scatters leaves like confetti across the ground below – but his head feels stuffy, clogged with damp wool and hard to think through, though all the windows are open and in truth the room is too cold. There is a three-floor drop to the gravel, the flowerbed below his window, but there are also several protruding bricks edges, guttering, and most importantly a cast-iron downspout which could give him an easy ride down to the ground.

Erik is on his feet, leaning over the sill, _The Once and Future King_ lying forgotten on the floor beside his chair. There is little impediment to him exiting via this window whenever he chooses, never mind walking out of the door and having to confront some overly-concerned face with too-large eyes and too-long eyelashes (he has no idea if he means Charles or Raven).

Shaking his head at the ease of this route, and the way that he has apparently overlooked it for so long, Erik turns back to the bedroom in pursuit of adequate supplies – there is money, he knows, under the mattress, and he has a gun safely under the middle floorboard of the room. He pulls on boots with quick, automatic movements, tight-lacing them for climbing.

A wood pigeon flies past the open window in a flurry of wings, feathered handclaps disturbing him from a sudden blankness. There is a smell of wood-smoke on the wind, and the room is too cold.

Erik picks up the green-bound book from the floor and cradles it in his hands. He supposes it must have fallen, although how he didn’t notice _when he was quite sure he was still reading it_ troubles him, momentarily. He’s wearing boots, and that makes no sense either.

He sits back in the chair, and methodically unlaces his boots, frowning. Something is not right, but he can’t quite put his finger on what.

* * *

“Something on your mind?” Charles asks, watching Erik’s face intently. There is a fire in the grate throwing shadows on the wall until the room looks like a Flemish painting of Hell, turning Charles’s pale and unmarked skin into another work of complex art; it is easy to appreciate the beauty of the form when it is delineated this way.

 _Well, you’d know_ , Erik thinks, but he says nothing. It’s not as if he has to.

Charles laughs into his hands at his own ridiculousness, and sighs. “Good point,” he says, scratching his head awkwardly, “But that’s just it. There _isn’t_ … as far as I can tell. But you’re miles away.”

Erik apologises without pause or sincerity, and removes his jumper in one movement. The world outside the bedroom window is as black as the bottom of a mine, and their faces, their bodies – the whole room – are reflected perfectly back on the darkened glass. Erik can see over his own shoulder the complex map of raised white lines that spell out every encounter he has failed to win, be it with human agency or the inexorable force of gravity; he can see a duplicate of Charles and his largely hairless chest, his pinkened cheeks, his apparently irrepressible smile.

For a moment he wonders what it must be like to be inside Charles’s head, looking at him, half-naked in the firelight with his hundreds of maggots-beneath-the-hide scars rendering him imperfect, marked, somehow _sullied_ by the life he has lived.

“You look nothing like that,” Charles assures him, aloud, acknowledging the intrusion with a soft motion of fingertips on the side of his on face. “I could show you, if you want, but you – that’s _not_ how I think of you.”

Erik lets his gaze drift down Charles pointedly before saying, “Yes, I can see that.”

As he suspected he would, Charles can’t help laughing at this. He lowers his head to laugh, looking down at the source of Erik’s sardonic remark, his face red. “Take it as a compliment, won’t you?”

For a second, less than a second, something in Erik’s chest tightens, producing a squirming and short-lived thought – more of a damp squib without form or solidity – but in the tiny time it is alive it niggles at him like a splinter: _shouldn’t I be doing something?_

He almost laughs at himself when he catches sight of Charles and the searching look on his face that is bordering on concern once more. Yes, there _is_ something he should be doing; Erik takes three steps forward, turning away from his reflection in the darkened windows, and seizes Charles by both shoulders at once. It is, granted, not the most tender and soft-handed of caresses, but Erik’s never seen the point in that. Tenderness is the province of women.

Charles is warm to the touch and tips his head back, standing on his toes to kiss Erik; it is a familiar taste, a familiar movement, by now. There is even some comfort in the familiarity, in the shape of Charles’s hand on his face, holding them steady as Erik’s fingers clamp down on _his_ shoulders. There is rather more than comfort in the surprising softness – surprising every time – of Charles’s mouth and in the way he leans toward Erik not just with his mouth but with his whole body.

Erik runs his hand over the back of Charles’s shoulder, over the flesh-sunken contour of his scapulae (which is neither as stark nor as bony as Erik’s own), down across the gentle, barely-defined muscles which form the slopes of his lower back, until his fingers rest in the dip just before back becomes buttocks.

He kisses Charles on the neck, another curve of transformation – the spot where neck becomes shoulder, an almost-spongy deltoid as soft and hairless as a man half his age. Charles pushes against him from the waist down, breathing too hard in Erik’s ear. He smells of smoke from the fire, some cologne that probably cost more than everything Erik owns now, and sweat … by far the sweeter perfume.

As he frowns at the thought, Erik catches sight of himself in the window again; Charles is licking the place where his clavicles meet, with concentration and diligence, and Erik’s hands rest on his lumbar, pulling him in closer, snaking downward to hold Charles’s buttocks. He can see himself, his cheek against Charles’s hair, in doppelganger in the dark, his body naked from the waist up, his shoulders tense and his mouth open.

Again, as he watches this spectacle suspended deep in the night, above the lawns of the Westchester Estate, Erik has a faint and persistent sense that something isn’t quite … that something, something he hasn’t quite … something is wrong, something is … he shouldn’t _be_ here …

 _The feeling is washed away by the pressure of Charles’s cock against his leg. There is an answer, slow but determined, from his own groin, and Erik turns his attention from the ghostly mirror images in the window, and toward the heat of Charles’s chest against his own (and a little against his stomach)._

 _ _There is somewhere else he’s supposed to be_._

Erik rubs his thumb against the small of Charles’s back, up and down, slow, thoughtful. Distracted. Charles chews on his own lip and makes a noise Erik recognises more with his body than with his mind, changing the position of his hands more and more quickly until he’s not so much moving from place to place as just … rubbing.

The only sounds in the room are the gentle popping of firewood in the grate and the shallow, quick breaths coming from both of their mouths, out of time with each other like an ever-changing drum rhythm. Erik blinks away the last vestiges of something like unease, and gives his full attention to biting as softly as he can on one of Charles’s nipples.

* * *

Under the Xavier mansion, the bunker maintains a constant temperature; above the mansion the skies are the hot, intense white of an incoming storm, not so much thick with clouds as comprised of nothing but cloud. The bunker, however, is as dark, solid, and theoretically impenetrable as ever. Erik patiently knots lengths of copper tube, one after another, keeping in his mind the image of a submarine vanishing into the distance below him.

Cold tides of fury wash through his mind with each knot, submarine, knot, Schmidt, knot; held in place by this certainty of betrayal, the moment when his chance for revenge was yanked away from him, the anger continues to fountain up like a leak from some undersea pipe. He finds the manipulation of the metal comes easily to him, like this.

Knot, submarine, knot, betrayal, knot, anger, knot.

Of course the impenetrability of the bunker is far from total; though it is structurally sufficient to withstand even the blonde one … _Havok_ … and his increasingly controlled blasts, it does have a door. No fortress with a door is really a complete fortress, as at least one person Erik pursued discovered to her cost; right now, the door is opening.

Raven – the avatar of what Raven wishes to look like – stands awkwardly on one leg, rubbing the top of her boot against the back of her calf, leaning on the open door with a pained look. Erik lays the latest knotted length of pipe on the ground with the others, a haphazard tangle of metal waste he was planning to later unknot and straighten for further exercise; wielding a length of pipe and a face of stony, stormy displeasure is not calculated to put a nervous young woman at ease.

She doesn’t wait for him to ask her what’s wrong. “Something’s not right.”

“Nothing’s right,” Erik says, dismissing her without considering what she’s saying. He lifts the next pipe without touching it.

“Yeah,” Raven says slowly, leaning on the door a little harder. It swings on its hinges; Erik has a brief and vivid memory, one he thought he’d successfully trapped in a safer part of his mind than the one he _uses_ , of himself as a small boy swinging on the door, the door, he can’t remember which door – not where it lead to or where it lead from. All he remembers, for a moment, is himself: a thin, awkward child with the confidence and internality of the sole offspring of a family, holding onto the metal doorknob and swinging, as silent as a ghost, swinging through the air between one forgotten room and another. “But why isn’t it?”

Erik thrusts the memory back into the depths of his mind and knots the pipe in the air in front of him; it’s harder now, and he has to make a pulling motion with his hands twice, the grunt of effort echoing on the semi-circular bunker.

“What?”

“Why isn’t it right?” Raven asks, holding the door still. “I keep thinking … and then just … it’s gone again. I feel like, I feel like I’m … like I’m asleep. Dreaming.”

Erik says, “You’re awake now.”

“Are you _sure_?” Raven asks, biting her lip in exactly the same way that Charles does when he’s embarrassed. She seems more worried than anything else; hiding her face, but leaving her feelings in plain view.

He lets the pipe clatter to the floor as if he’s emphasising the solid nature of reality, but in truth it’s becoming too hard to hold it up. The anger is draining away, replaced by a less familiar and less welcome feeling: cold doubt, creeping like ice through his limbs and into his chest.

“Why not punch the wall and find out if it hurts?” Erik suggests, sighing.

“I’m serious. Something isn’t …” Raven’s mask creases into a distressed scowl. “ _I don’t know why I came down here_.”

He steps away from the untidy heaps of knotted and unknotted pipe (untidy, because the observance of neat piling of nonsense tasks was the province of circumstances he cannot afford to forget, but never wishes to relive), abandoning it for the time being. “Were you looking for me?”

“No. I don’t know. I don’t know what I was looking for.” Raven’s eyes, which have so far assumed the tiresome human hue, their unnatural disguised form, revert to their real colour, and even with the chill of doubt stalking through him and freezing his rage into icicles, his compassion into dust, he wants to tell her: _leave them the way they belong. Look at yourself._ “I don’t know – I don’t know if I meant to come down here at all. I don’t know where I was going.”

For a moment Erik tries to weigh this against the sensations of _déjà vu_ , but the precise memories slip away from like phantoms in fog. The bunker has not changed temperature, he’s sure, but he feels numb and detached, almost, from his own body, by his inability to even recall the places where memories _should_ be.

“Why are you telling me?” Erik says – he doesn’t phrase it as a question, the inflection lost somewhere in the suspicion. “Why not tell Charles if you’re worried you’re … losing your mind? It’s his area.”

With a careful nod – so delicate that it seems as if she is afraid her head will become detached if she moves it much – Raven sits down on the floor, cross-legged, self-consciously arranging her skirt to prevent her flashing her underwear; as if he would ever care, as if he would ever look at what has doubtless been as carefully transformed as the rest of her false body.

“That’s why,” she says heavily.

Erik nods, too, and folds his arms across himself as if that could protect him, somehow. He dislikes the gesture but does not reverse it. “That’s why.”

The tunnel-shaped bunker – a tunnel from nowhere to nowhere – is lined with insulated electrical wires, for the lighting that hums and buzzes overhead. The light is sickly, artificial, and casts unreal shadows beneath everything it touches, multiple shadows which shift position with each flicker. It would be easy to think he is dreaming, Erik thinks, but he’s not sure why the idea has occurred to him at all.

“Raven?” he offers her his hand, but she gets up on her own.

There is confusion in her eyes, which are – for some reason – currently exhibiting their natural, beautiful golden colour, and she brushes dust from her skirt with a briefly accusing look, as if he has lured her down here for some sordid reason.

“Is everything all right?” he asks, when her wary expression fails to give way to any indication of why she’s here.

Raven says, “No, I don’t think it is.”

And though he can’t define _why_ , he finds himself agreeing with her.


End file.
